Category Archives: Local Government

Getting From Here to There

MIBOR and the Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce sent out a media release announcing the results of recent polling on Indianapolis’ upcoming transit referendum.

Poll results released today shows broad-based support across Marion County registered voters for this fall’s ballot initiative to improve mass transit in Indianapolis. Following last week’s public rollout of the grassroots initiative, Transit Drives Indy, there is clear momentum and public support for the Marion County Transit Plan.

As American Strategies reported, “Fully 61 percent support the referendum, which will appear on the ballot this November, with just 33 percent opposed. The measure attracts bipartisan support and majority backing in each region of the county.”

Support was broad-based. According to the self-identification of respondents, 74% of Democrats, 55% of Independents, and 47% of Republicans support the effort to expand transit and intend to vote for the tax necessary to support it.

 Across the region, support was strongest in the northern (66%) and central (62%) parts of the county, though support was strong across the entire county.

“We are pleased with the broad support among Marion County residents who recognize the value that improved transit service will bring to our neighborhoods, our business community and our city—jobs, quality of life, and greater independence,” said Mark Fisher, vice president of government relations and policy development of the Indy Chamber. “The Marion County Transit Plan will better connect job seekers and employers while ensuring Indianapolis remains competitive for talent.”

MIBOR (Metropolitan Indianapolis Board of Realtors) president Roger Lundy pointed out that all of central Indiana will benefit from improved mass transit. Transit is key to connecting neighborhoods, to providing access to housing opportunities, and enabling independence for vulnerable populations–the disabled, and especially the aging population that is growing dramatically as residents of central Indiana live longer.

It isn’t just older Hoosiers who want the ability to move about the city without a car. Downtown Indianapolis is in the midst of a housing boom, and despite the whopping number of new units being built, and the premium rents being charged, occupancy rates have remained well over 90%. Many of the people moving into the center city are millennials, and of that age cohort, some 10% do not own–or want–a car.

What they and their grandparents do want is what so many cities have: reliable, frequent, modern mass transit options that enhance the quality of community life. Convenient, cost-saving and environmentally friendly transportation options.

We’ve waited a long time to join the ranks of cities that actually work.

Comments

Another Troubling Data Point

The Kinder Institute at Rice University recently completed a study of mayoral elections in Indiana. (The reason for the focus on the Hoosier State was the partisan nature of our mayoral elections; elsewhere, evidently, elections for municipal offices tend to be nonpartisan.)

The report, Mayoral Elections in Indiana 2003-2015 examined a variety of facets of mayoral elections in the Hoosier State, analyzing mayoral races in 474 general elections and 706 primary elections in more than 120 Indiana cities. (To be candid, I didn’t think Indiana had 120 cities….)

The Institute documented a swing toward the GOP over the time period studied. That didn’t come as a big surprise; the small cities and towns that dot the Hoosier state tend to be more rural in nature, and to reflect the more conservative politics of rural Indiana.

What did surprise (and depress) me was the following “data point”:

In addition to the partisan shift, the report also found that more than 20 percent of all mayoral elections in Indiana go uncontested. This issue is especially acute in the state’s smallest cities. For example, in cities with less than 5,000 residents, nearly 29 percent of mayoral elections were uncontested, compared with 13 percent in the state’s largest cities.

Evidently, citizens in Indiana–and especially in our state’s smaller communities– are uninterested in the management of those communities. That seems counter-intuitive for a whole lot of reasons.

It’s understandable that the prospect of a partisan rough-and-tumble would turn off potential candidates for office, especially in this age of nasty politicking. But the hardball politics of larger communities are rarely on exhibit in small towns where everyone knows everyone else.

Furthermore, the public management issues in small towns tend to be very practical: policing and fire protection (the latter often handled by a volunteer brigade), collecting trash, paving streets, retaining the merchants on Main Street. These are issues far removed from the ideological wars that characterize campaigns for state and federal offices, but their proper oversight directly and substantially affects community residents.

Tending one’s own garden only takes you so far. Like it or not, we live with other people, and the rules and processes we put in place to regulate our interactions with our fellow-citizens affect our daily lives.

So why is it that, in one-fifth of Indiana’s cities and towns, no one cares enough to take on the responsibility for managing those processes and providing essential services? And why is the problem more acute in the smaller communities that we think of as more “neighborly” and interdependent?

Any theories?

Comments

“Embracing” Mike Pence

Indiana’s political version of musical chairs has now resolved itself into a ballot that offers Hoosiers some unanticipated choices.

Who would have predicted a re-entry of Evan Bayh into Hoosier electoral politics? Who would have imagined Mike Pence on the Trump Train? And who, exactly, is Eric Holcomb, our sudden candidate for Governor?

Holcomb, who spent something like three months as Pence’s chosen Lieutenant Governor, after the departure of Sue Ellspermann (the only woman and arguably only competent member of the Administration) has emerged as our new and improbable candidate for Governor. As part of his introduction to the Hoosier electorate, Holcomb has told media outlets that he intends to “embrace” Mike Pence’s record. Holcomb has also been quoted as saying that he is “quite proud” of Pence’s tenure, and “proud of where the state is now.”

Holcomb has thus tied himself firmly to a record that many of us predicted would elect John Gregg in November.

I can’t help wondering just how completely Holcomb really “embraces” the particulars of Pence’s record. Does Holcomb share Pence’s “culture war” goals, for example? If so, which ones?

No sane candidate is likely to promote passage of another RFRA, given the civic and economic damage caused by that unforced error, but what about adding “four words and a comma” to Indiana’s civil rights law, and protecting LGBTQ Hoosiers from being discriminated against simply because of who they are? Governor Pence adamantly opposed civil rights protections for Indiana’s gay citizens. Does Holcomb “embrace” that opposition?

And which of Governor Pence’s approaches to pre-school funding does Holcomb “embrace”—his original decision to decline an 80 million dollar grant that would have created a statewide preschool program, or the U-turn he took on that issue this year, when his original decision turned out to be politically damaging?

Speaking of education, if Glenda Ritz is re-elected as Superintendent of Public Instruction, is Holcomb prepared to let her do her job, or will he “embrace” Pence’s constant efforts to strip her of authority over the state’s educational policies? Will he “embrace” and continue Pence’s practice of diverting funds from Indiana’s public schools in order to finance the nation’s most extensive voucher program–a program that largely benefits religious schools—even though a recent Brookings Institution study confirmed that voucher students’ reading and math scores were significantly lower than the scores of similar students who remained in public schools?

Does candidate Holcomb “embrace” Pence’s continuing war on Planned Parenthood and women’s reproductive rights? Did he support the bill the Governor so eagerly signed—subsequently struck down by a federal court—that, among other indignities, required women to conduct funerals for their aborted or miscarried fetuses?

Does Holcomb “embrace” and plan to continue Pence’s efforts to keep organizations like Catholic Charities and Exodus from resettling Syrian refugees in Indiana? Is he “proud” of this mean-spirited retreat from “Hoosier Hospitality”?

What about Indiana’s crumbling infrastructure? Is Holcomb “proud” of the condition of Indiana’s roads and bridges? And what about economic development? Is Holcomb “proud” that the majority of new jobs Pence brags about pay less than a living wage?

I can’t wait to hear just how far Holcomb’s “embrace” extends.

Comments

Contrary to Popular Belief

Contrary to Popular Belief is the title of the just-issued book based on Michael Leppert’s blog about Indiana government, for which I was honored to write the Foreward. As he does in his blog, Leppert offers a thoughtful and informed window into state government.

If timing is really everything, the book should hit the big time, because (among other things), there are numerous observations of Indiana’s Governor, who is now a Vice-Presidential candidate on the “Mango Mussolini” ticket. (I stole that description from John Oliver.)

There are insights into Pence’s contract with Real Alternatives, observations about the departure of Lieutenant Governor Ellspermann (arguably the only truly competent member of the administration), about the Governor’s efforts to prevent resettlement of Syrian refugees in Indiana, the “news” bureau disaster dubbed Pravda on the Prairie, the anti-abortion bill funeral requirement that sparked “Periods for Pence,” and of course, RFRA. Among others.

As I wrote in the Forward, Contrary to Popular Belief is an effort by one of Indiana’s most thoughtful, perceptive and informed observers to break through our cynicism, to avoid the constant hype and agitprop coming from entrenched interests, and to engage in what has come to be seen as an almost subversive act –actual communication about the ways in which our state and local governments function. Such communication, unfortunately, has become rare in our polarized age, especially when its focus is at the state level.

There are many valuable observations in the pages of this book, but there are three insights that I think are especially worth emphasizing. First, and perhaps most obvious, is a very personal and candid look at the reality of lobbying—a reality far removed from the popular image of nefarious characters in pin-striped suits working to subvert democracy in order to enrich their corporate masters. Such individuals undoubtedly exist, but they do not represent the legions of policy advocates who see their job as informing the legislative process and ensuring that contending points of view are adequately represented.

The second observation is related to the first: to the extent our democratic system fails to work, it is because all points of view are not equally or even adequately represented—and the reason that is so, the reason democratic institutions do not work as well as they should—is less likely to be the result of individual malfeasance than it is of systemic influences. One of the great virtues of this book is its author’s rejection of the impulse to paint “them” (insert your preferred nemesis here) as the source of all our problems, and his illumination of the ways in which our state and local governments actually work.

It turns out that there are many diligent and well-intentioned political actors on both sides of the aisle who actually want to improve the lives of Indiana citizens. Sometimes they agree on the best way to do so; sometimes they don’t. Making good policy, it turns out, is more complicated than simply electing those you believe to be the “good guys.”

And that brings me to what I personally believe is the most important insight Leppert shares: the fact that “the average person in Indiana now knows far too many trivial tidbits about high profile government types in Washington, D.C. and less and less about their state legislators, mayors and city councilors.” Americans—and Hoosiers—are dangerously ignorant of the governing systems within which they live and work, and the ways in which those institutions structure and affect their own daily lives.

The book is available on Amazon.

 

Comments

Just Give Me the Money!

We need to ask Governor Pence just what part of “accountability” he doesn’t understand.

The IBJ recently reported that the administration is refusing to give the federal government access to information about HIP 2.0–the system that he used to implement Medicaid while insisting that it WAS NOT MEDICAID, NO SIREE! Well, in all fairness, it did have differences; it covers fewer Hoosiers than a simple Medicaid expansion would have done, for one. Call it Medicaid-lite.

The plan was sufficiently in compliance with Medicaid regulations to allow the federal government to fund it–on condition that they evaluate the program after it had been in effect for a period of time. When the time came for the state to submit information needed for that evaluation, however, Pence refused to comply.

The most recent flare-up between the Pence and Obama administrations came when Indiana missed a June 17 deadline for submitting data to the federal government on who was enrolled and what kind of benefits they were receiving.

Now, maybe I’m missing something, but when the agency that is paying for a program asks for information needed to determine how you are using its money, it seems reasonable that you would comply.

But of course, the words “reasonable” and “Mike Pence” are rarely found in the same sentence. (That’s probably why Trump finds him congenial.)

Indiana officials, however, have balked for months at the federal review, saying they are conducting their own outside review.

“I am concerned that two evaluations being conducted at the same time has the potential to create contentious outcomes which can impede fair, impartial and empirical analysis of demonstration projects,” Pence wrote in December to the U.S. secretary of health and human services.

To some observers, the conflict seems to boil down to this: Pence doesn’t trust the federal government to do a fair evaluation.

Gee–if I were the federal government, I wouldn’t trust Pence to administer a fair system.

A former state official has a theory about why a simple element of accountability–a look at the books to determine whether federal funds are producing the agreed-upon results–has Mikey’s panties in a twist:

“From the beginning, when Pence established this Medicaid expansion by using HIP, he has struggled to make it look like it’s an Indiana plan, not a federal plan,” said Sally McCarty, former Indiana insurance commissioner under Democratic Gov. Frank O’Bannon, and a former senior research fellow at the Center of Health Insurance Reforms at the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute.

“He probably doesn’t want to relinquish ownership of any of it and give any control to the federal government,” McCarty said.

He just wants the money–no pesky “accountability strings” attached.

I don’t think it works that way.

Comments